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Wednesday, June 22, 2011

At Work with Linux: Automatic Timed Logins

In a post back in February I described how to add automatic account login to a Linux installation. Since that time I've had to the need to enable a delayed automatic or timed login, the reason being that some users of virtual machines wanted to select some other account other than the automatic default account. So I went looking around, and as usual, found the answer fairly quickly.

Linux Automatic Timed Login

File Location

/etc/gdm

File Name

custom.conf

Changes to Make

Under the section labeled [daemon], add the following lines;TimedLoginEnable=TrueTimedLogin=usernameTimedLoginDelay=delay_time_in_seconds

Note that these configuration lines are exclusive to automatic login. You can have one or the other but not both. And that's what timed automatic login is supposed to provide, the best of both worlds. With a value of 60 (seconds) most users have plenty of time to login into a alternate account before the timeout is reached for the default account.

Again it should be noted that the file requires root access for editing, so use the recommended method for your given distribution.